“Great book.
Like most great sci-fi, it relates directly to something in real life. In this case, the feeling of going to fight a war and coming back to a world that has still been moving on without you.
In this case it’s taken to the extreme. Because of some complicated theoretical physics stuff that isn’t all that important, the soldiers who leave Earth perceive time passing as normally, however 25 days of deep space deployment can end up being equal to as many years passing on Earth.
It’s interesting because you get both the perspective of the battlefield and the historical perspective at the same time. The immediacy and terror parts, and then the part where we look back on it and it’s almost meaningless. I mean, the Falklands War seems very pointless and absurd when we look back at it. And that was only about 30 years ago rather than 300. And I’m sure that to people who were there or who lost loved ones, it doesn’t seem so insignificant.
This is the kind of book I wish I’d been assigned when I was young. There are so many classics about war, but what’s nice about this book is that you can still discuss a lot of the same themes and ideas about war, but history and politics don’t get all mashed up in the discussion. And it’s okay to talk about the war in this book seeming pointless whereas people who fought in Vietnam might bristle at hearing that, even if they partially agree.”